Comment by pron
4 hours ago
Nah, it's a skill issue on the part of those who believe in "agent swarms" (in fact, that's how I recognise AI noobs; they think swarms work). Studies (like this [1]) and Anthropic's experiements have told us they don't. We do experiments with software correctness and formal methods experts who actually dive deep into "swarm outputs" and try to put evolutionary pressure on them. Swarms simply cannot (yet) produce viable software. They do, however, produce software that for a while passes tests. What I think is happening is that people who believe swarms work just look at test results. But obviously, every software engineer has known for decades that tests can only tell you if your software works today; they can't tell you that it will work tomorrow. And the people who say that unreviewed agent output will work tomorrow are those who didn't review it closely enough, so they have no idea, either.
You're successfully beating the shit out of the strawman you've created. People are using LLMs to see massive productivity benefits and ship production code right now.
If you aren't, it's a skill issue on your part
Oh, I think you just haven't read my comments. What I wrote, and I quote was: "AI can help software developers in many ways, but not like that."
I was saying how much more productive LLMs make developers unless you use them in the way Armstrong advocates. Coding agents are amazingly helpful but not when you use them through "fleets" or "swarms". People who know how to be most productive with coding agents know that, but Armstrong doesn't.